In the Rose Garden of the White House hangs not a portrait of history, but a manifesto of power. To the left Trump, to the right Trump - and in between no person, no face, no predecessor, but a metallic arm, a technical joint, a cold pen that automatically places a signature on paper. The autopen replaces Joe Biden. The image looks like a farce, a tasteless plaything, yet it is the precise staging of a politics that does not fight the opponent with arguments but destroys through images. Trump looms twice, Biden is dehumanized, reduced to a machine that knows no dignity. The message is unmistakable: I am real, he was only mechanics. I am power, he was function.
That this humiliation went viral not by chance is part of the calculation. Karoline Leavitt, young, flawless, press secretary of the government, spread the images via her official account - and she did not rely on neutral channels, but quoted Breitbart. Breitbart, the platform that Steve Bannon proudly called the "platform of the Alt-Right," that for years has spewed racist conspiracy theories, stirred hatred against Muslims, and elevated dehumanization into a method. Breitbart thus becomes the voice of the government, the line between propaganda and politics erased. It is no coincidence, but a signal: extremism now carries a seal, no longer preached at the margins but proclaimed at the center of power.
The perfidy lies in the doubling: Biden is degraded to the autopen, and this humiliation is not communicated soberly but through a platform that is itself a synonym for agitation. The image says: the opponent is machine. The channel says: our source is hate. And Leavitt is the figure that connects these two levels. She is the smiling face of an apparatus that gilds the poison. Breitbart becomes respectable through her, far-right narratives receive the stamp of statehood, and propaganda dresses itself in a professional PR suit.
This aesthetic is known. Stalin had opponents removed from photos, Mussolini placed himself in superhuman poses, the National Socialists created visual worlds in which their enemies either disappeared or were deformed into caricatures. It is the pattern of all authoritarian systems: the opponent must not exist, except as degradation. In the Rose Garden this pattern repeats - in the midst of democracy, with golden frames, in front of rolling cameras. Trump is present twice, Biden not at all. Instead there stands a machine that thinks nothing, feels nothing, only writes.
And Europe? It looks on. It courts Trump, it signs contracts, it congratulates. As if nothing more hung there than decor. As if it were normal that Nazi propaganda is cited in the White House. As if it were indifferent that democracy itself is degraded into a machine. Europe speaks of transatlantic values and at the same time bows before a president who in his own garden shows how to annihilate opponents. It is willing blindness, born of fear of isolation and greed for markets, and it is no less shameful than the image itself. And Trump knows how to fill this void: he hangs himself twice on the wall, he displaces, he crushes, he elevates. With every frame, with every tweet, with every PR staging the republic becomes more a dictatorship in which only one lives - and all others become shadows.
This is no walk through history, it is a walk through cynicism. Golden frames, double portraits, a machine instead of a human being. Karoline Leavitt pours it all into the language of power, Breitbart makes it viral, and the world pretends it is only a curious picture. Yet it is more: a mosaic of humiliation, a lesson about the quiet transformation of democracy into demagoguery. The republic hangs in a golden frame. The autopen hums. Trump laughs. Leavitt tweets. Europe remains silent. And we all know: this is not theater, this is the beginning of a protocol.
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Es ist wie in Deutschland. Eigentlich müssten sich alle Demokraten einig sein, massiv gegen die AfD zu stehen und sie schlussendlich zu verbieten.
So auch die EU gegen die USA, verbieten ist natürlich nicht, aber man könnte so viele Allianzen bilden und die USA isolieren, Trump damit schwächen, bis auch der letzte US-Amerikaner sieht, was Faschismus bewirkt.
Aber seit ich Erdogan gesehen habe, der vor seinem Besuch in den USA, Trump lächerlich machte, um sich dann im Oval Office von Trump der Wahlfälschung bezichtigen zu lassen und auch, wie alle anderen, jede Beleidigung hinnahm, glaube ich nicht mehr daran, dass irgendeiner den Mut hat, ihm endlich Paroli zu bieten.